Changes to Dallas police shoplifting policy spur drop in crime stats

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Kye R. Lee/Staff Photographer

Jeremy Shorr, the owner of Titan Comics in northwest Dallas, said of the Dallas police policy on petty shoplifting: “Last time I checked, the police are there to protect me, not to have me do their paperwork.”

But nearly a third of that reduction is because of a new policy that makes it harder for store owners to report shoplifting cases under $50, The Dallas Morning News has found.

Police Chief David Brown last weekdisputed that finding, saying the low numbers of reported retail thefts are the result of good police work, not the change in reporting policy. He said his department’s new crackdown on “fences” — people who buy and sell stolen goods — drove shoplifting lower.

He said the new focus also has led to this year’s double-digit drops in burglaries and other types of theft. These reductions have caused the drop in the overall crime rate, which consists mostly of property crimes.

“Shutting down fence operations has a big impact on the black market for stolen property, reducing the incentive for thieves to steal,” Brown said.

The News looked specifically at shoplifting, and in those cases found otherwise.

Among the findings:

The drop in shoplifting cases occurred on the same day the new reporting policy took effect.

The decrease occurred before the new focus on fencing operations was substantially under way.

Many small store managers say the new policy makes it unlikely they will report petty shoplifting cases.

More serious shoplifting offenses have dropped only slightly.

Bruce Prettyman, a retired Dallas property crimes detective, scoffed at Brown’s assertion that the focus on fencing operations produced the dramatic drop in shoplifting.

“He’s playing with the numbers, trying to reduce his crimes,” the veteran detective said. “If you can’t report it, it’s not a crime. If it’s not a crime, it doesn’t go into the stats.”

Under the policy, police typically no longer respond to or take reports for Class C misdemeanor shoplifting cases — cases with stolen property worth less than $50.

In cases where the retailer has not collared the thief, police operators now direct businesses to go online to print out a form and mail it to police headquarters. Police used to take such reports by phone or in person.

In cases where retailers have thieves in custody, police direct them to try to identify the suspect, complete and notarize required paperwork, then send it to municipal prosecutors. Police will respond if the retailer cannot identify the person. The officer will attempt to identify the culprit but still won’t issue a citation or take a report for the shoplifting.

Jeremy Shorr, owner of Titan Comics in northwest Dallas, said the policy is too cumbersome for small shops such as his. “Last time I checked, the police are there to protect me, not to have me do their paperwork,” Shorr said.

An analysis of the year’s petty shoplifting reports suggests that store operators like Shorr have become less likely to report minor shoplifting incidents. The reports plummeted Jan. 5. That’s exactly the day the new reporting policy took effect.

Before that date, minor shoplifting offenses averaged about 10 a day. Immediately afterward, that average fell to fewer than three a day. The average has remained steady at that lower level since.

With police recording about seven fewer petty shoplifting offenses a day, the reductions have accumulated. By the end of August, petty shoplifting had fallen by 1,692 reports — 73 percent — compared with the same period the year before.

Meanwhile, more serious shoplifting offenses of $50 or more — for which police still often respond to the scene — dropped by only 2 percent.

Dallas has recorded historic declines in reported crime in recent years. Through the end of 2011, overall crime has fallen for a record eight consecutive years, which is consistent with a nationwide trend. The city is now on pace to achieve a ninth year of declining crime.

In previous years, The News has reported on a variety of methods Dallas police have used to lower the crime rate on paper by the way offenses are reported. These methods include downgrading incidents so they don’t count in the crime rate and putting up barriers that make it harder to report crimes.

For instance, in 2007, the department began downgrading many aggravated assaults, meaning the cases don’t go into the city’s violent crime tally. The downgrades are in violation of federal guidelines.

Dallas isn’t alone. Manipulating crime numbers is pervasive among police agencies nationwide, said John Eterno, a former New York City police officer and co-author of the book The Crime Numbers Game: Management by Manipulation.

“The public is just not served by a police department whose aim is just to make the numbers look good,” Eterno said.

Brown said the Dallas Police Department’s shoplifting policy change was not for cosmetic purposes but was designed to increase efficiency and conviction rates.

The policy change was made with little, if any, fanfare, though The News reported it at the time. Along with the policy change, the police took steps that department and city officials trumpeted loudly. Those included the creation of a retail theft task force, announced in December, which has focused on stopping illicit businesses that trade in stolen merchandise. The task force now numbers about two dozen officers.

The change in the response policy freed up officers for the task force, Brown said. The idea was to treat theft cases much like drug cases, focusing on big operations rather than individual small-time criminals.

The chief said there has been a 30 percent increase in shoplifting arrests this year.

“We’ve shut down 70 fence locations and arrested 79 stolen property dealers, which have had a major impact on property crime reduction,” he said.

According to police records, the task force made only a few arrests before Jan. 5, the date the drop in shoplifting offenses occurred. When The News asked Brown for some of the task force’s significant cases, he provided information about arrests that occurred in March, June and July.

The News asked the chief how he could credit a crime drop to arrests that, based on Dallas police records, had not yet occurred.

“We just don’t agree with your assertions or analysis of what happened and the timing of what happened,” Brown said in an email last week. “We began arresting more thieves immediately at the beginning of this year and building cases that took several weeks to file but had an almost immediate impact on theft and burglary.”

Large Dallas retailers worked closely with police to craft the new strategy. Among big cities, Dallas has one of the worst organized retail theft problems in the nation. So the big retailers have much to gain from a police unit solely dedicated to investigating and dismantling organized groups.

The big retailers have loss-prevention employees who are well-equipped to handle the police department’s new paperwork requirements for petty shoplifters.

“DPD is saying, ‘Is there a better way?’” said Joe Williams of the Texas Retailers Association. “Why keep doing something the same old way and never looking at it saying, ‘Can we be more efficient and use our resources better and yet maintain and uphold the law?’ I applaud them for doing it.”

But to some small store operators, it feels as if police are abandoning them. Mohammad Hamdan, who runs a Shell station in the Red Bird area, said he will confront a thief to get merchandise back. But he said it’s unreasonable for police to expect him to try to identify the thief.

“Shoplifters don’t wait around for you to gather more information about them,” he said.

Rich Mellor, a former police officer and vice president of loss prevention for the National Retail Association, said he sees an inherent danger in police departments asking shops to perform what is essentially a law enforcement task of stopping, detaining and identifying a suspect.

“It’s easy to say, ‘Well, these are just minor shoplifting incidents,’” Mellor said. “But every single one of them can bear serious consequences, and that person doesn’t want to be caught any more than the person that steals $1,000.”

Several police and retail experts told The News that the efforts to target organized retail theft would be unlikely to affect petty shoplifting. Those experts say the typical petty shoplifter steals items for personal use, not to sell to a fence.

“That’s what people refer to as the amateur shoplifter,” Mellor said. “They’re taking for their own personal needs. They need a package of razors or maybe it’s a food product or beverage.”

Individuals involved in organized retail theft are “stealing hundreds and thousands of dollars of merchandise,” Mellor said. “They’re not stealing below $50 or even below $100.”

teiserer@dallasnews.com; sthompson@dallasnews.com

IN THE KNOW: The counting game

The Dallas Police Department has altered the way crime is counted in several areas over the years. This creates an apples and oranges situation where, because crimes are counted differently, it is difficult to determine actual crime trends. Here are some of the known accounting changes The Dallas Morning News has noted in recent years:

Aggravated assaults: The News found in a 2009 investigative series that as a result of changes made in 2007, the department misclassified many aggravated assaults, meaning they didn’t go into the city’s violent crime tally. In a one-week sample of cases, a News review estimated that the department’s tally of aggravated assaults should have been at least 50 percent higher.

The department in 2007 changed the way it counts some crimes to subscribe to what is known as the “time and place” rule. Under this philosophy, if a string of crimes happened in the same relative area and probably were committed by the same suspects, the string of incidents counts as only one crime. For example, 15 car burglaries can count as only one crime if they occurred about the same time and place. (The rule does not apply to offenses such as murder, rape and aggravated assault. It applies to crimes such as theft, robbery and some burglaries).

Car burglaries: The News found that as a result of reporting changes made in 2008, Dallas police were discarding reports of seemingly legitimate car burglaries as untrustworthy. Police officials acknowledged flaws and made changes.

Residential and business burglaries: The News found in 2009 that the department continues what it says is a long-standing practice of classifying a case as vandalism — not burglary — if someone kicks in the door of a residence but is scared away by a person or alarm. The department’s reporting policy cuts Dallas’ reported burglary rate. A one-week sample of cases examined then by The News estimated the reduction for that week at about 10 percent.

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